A hard-paste porcelain baluster shaped coffee pot with a domed cover. Decorated with a pale turqouise ground and four (two on the lid, two on the base) quatrefoil polychrome reserves depicting land/sea-scapes. The cover is surmounted by a gilt pinecone final surrounded by tiny painted flowers on a white ground. The handles is of s-scroll form and the spout is of the beak shape, both are finihed with gilt. The reserves and the rims of the pot and cover are also fiished with a plain gilt border.

As the Meissen factory grew the artists began to turn not only to Chinese precedents but to introduce European motifs of decoration – landscape and harbour scenes derived from seventeenth-century French and Dutch paintings, European flowers and hunting and genre scenes became more common. This service combines European scenes with a delicate turquoise-green ground which may have been intended to resemble Chinese celadon porcelain in its hue.

Queen Caroline led the way in the acquisition of German and Chinese porcelains but Meissen porcelain was also mentioned in the accounts of Princess Augusta. In 1755, for example, a bill was charged by John Taylor, a china and glass dealer on Pall Mall, for packing and transporting Dresden china to Kew Palace.

Text adapted from The First Georgians; Art and Monarchy 1714 – 1760, London, 2014.